《我的生平——第一卷》

Part 73 / Part 76

On his thirty-seventh birthday Wagner was in hiding at Magdala when Minna arrived to urge him, once more, to leave Germany for good. No appeal could lift her to his mood. The parting was arranged at Professor Wolff’s house in Jena, where Liszt and Professor Widmann sat in council. A writ was out for his part in the Dresden rising; Widmann warned him off the direct route through Baden and offered his own outdated Tübingen passport. Minna watched her husband walk out to begin the six-hour tramp to Jena. He arrived at sunset, embraced her for the last time, and stepped into the mail-coach that same evening. Through Rudolstadt, past the Bavarian frontier, to Lindau he travelled, and spent a feverish night rehearsing the Swabian dialect against imagined encounters with Bavarian police. In the morning the policeman handed him three passports at random; he seized his own and dismissed the man with exaggerated friendliness. On the Lake Constance steamer, watching the spring morning spread over the Swiss water, he felt himself delivered. At Rorschach he set foot on Republican soil, and by evening was descending into Zürich as the Glarner Alps flared in the sunset.

Through his old friend Alexander Müller he met the cantonal secretaries Jacob Sulzer and Franz Hagenbuch, who received him with respectful curiosity. To win them he read his poem on the Death of Siegfried; he swore he had never had more attentive listeners. Within days they had drawn up a federal passport, and Wagner set off gaily for Paris, entranced at Strasbourg by the cathedral and on the malle-poste by what seemed the bass-register melody of Beethoven’s “Freude, schöner Götterfunken” humming in the wheels.

In Paris in the first week of June 1850 the cholera-stricken capital oppressed him. He lodged near Belloni, Liszt’s former secretary; funeral processions passed nearly every hour. At Schlesinger’s music shop he caught Meyerbeer hiding behind a desk for ten minutes. Meyerbeer pressed him to exploit Liszt’s brilliant article; Wagner replied with violence that he wanted nothing to do with artistic production in this hour of reaction. From these encounters he turned to the other Dresden fugitives: Semper, the architect of the Dresden Museum, and young Heine, the painter of his Lohengrin scenes. With Semper he spent the only bright hours of that stay.